Roese is a 20-year veteran of the IT industry who is credited with 20 pending or granted patents.

"John brings to EMC a unique blend of experience spanning the entire breadth of IT systems from silicon all the way up through networking, storage, servers and virtualization," Burton said in a statement. "In addition, he's directed product development in enterprise, carrier and consumer markets."

Roese was most recently general manager of North American R&D at networking and telecommunications giant Huawei.

At Nortel, Roese was the senior technology and R&D executive, overseeing an R&D staff of 12,000 and an annual budget of $1.7 billion.

Prior to Nortel, he was a CTO at Broadcom Corp.

Roese replaces Jeff Nick, who assumes a new CTO role and reports to Paul Maritz, EMC's chief strategist. In the new post, Nick will focus on big data and emerging applications initiatives, EMC said.

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